Moodle E-Learning Course Development

A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle

William H. Rice IV

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Moodle E-Learning Course Development Copyright © 2006 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: May 2006 Production Reference: 1160506 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 1-904811-29-9 www.packtpub.com

Cover Design by www.visionwt.com

Credits Author William H. Rice IV

Development Editor David Barnes

Reviewers Mark Bailye Gurudutt Talgery

Indexer Abhishek Shirodkar

Technical Editor Heidi Pearl Editorial Manager Dipali Chittar

Proofreader Chris Smith Production Coordinator Manjiri Nadkarni Cover Designer Helen Wood

About the Author William H. Rice IV is a training manager, a technical writer, and a knowledge manager who lives and works in New York City. He has been helping people to incorporate technology into their work processes since graduating with a degree in technical writing in 1988. He has developed training and documentation for Fortune 100 clients, hospitals, small businesses, and universities. His first book for Packt Publishing was User Training for Busy Programmers, ISBN 1-904811-45-0. When William isn't working, he enjoys foraging for edible wild plants in New York City parks, hiking and climbing in Pennsylvania, and archery within sight of J.F.K. International Airport. His current favorite blog is www.43folders.com. His favorite non-work activity is spending time with his beautiful wife and child. William maintains an online magazine for technical trainers and writers at www.williamrice.com. On this website, other trainers and writers are welcome to browse and submit articles. He can be reached through his website or at [email protected].

For my father, William III, who instilled in me a curiosity and love of learning; and for William V, to whom I hope to pass on this wonderful legacy.

About the Reviewers Gurudutt Talgery has close to twenty years of industry experience in areas of software development, software process, and product engineering working in the Indian arms of such companies as Texas Instruments and Tektronix. His area of interest is Digital Asset Management and Search Applications using open source solution stacks. He believes that technology exists for people rather than the other way round. When not thinking about asset management and search interfaces, Gurudutt dabbles into Oriental philosophy, Indic computing, and living a cyberlife exclusively on open source technologies. Gurudutt lives in Bangalore, India with his family.

Table of Contents Preface

1

Chapter 1: Introduction

5

Who is This Book For? 6 A Plan for Creating Your Learning Site 6 Step-By-Step: Using Each Chapter 6 Step 1: Learn About the Moodle Experience (Chapter 1) 7 Step 2: Install and Configure Moodle (Chapter 2) 7 Step 3: Create the Framework for Your Learning Site (Chapter 3) 7 Step 4: Add Basic Course Material (Chapter 4) 7 Step 5: Make Your Courses Interactive (Chapter 5) 8 Step 6: Make Your Course Social (Chapter 6) 8 Step 7: Create a Welcome for New and Existing Students (Chapter 7) 8 Step 8: Use Teacher's Tools to Deliver and Administer Courses (Chapter 8) 8 Step 9: Extend Moodle (Chapter 9) 9 The Moodle Philosophy 9 The Moodle Experience 10 The Moodle Front Page 11 Arriving at the Site Anonymous, Guest, and Registered Access The Main Menu Blocks Site Description Available Courses

Inside a Course Breadcrumbs Blocks Topics Join a Discussion Complete a Workshop Assessing Other Students' Work

Editing Mode Normal versus Editing Mode The Edit Icon

11 12 13 13 14 14

15 15 15 16 18 19 21

22 22 23

Table of Contents

The Delete Icon The Hidden/Shown Icons The Group Icons

Resources and Activities

24

Adding Resources and Activities

24

The Administration Block And Much More The Moodle Architecture The Moodle Application Directory The Moodle Data Directory The Moodle Database Summary

26 26 27 27 29 30 30

Chapter 2: Installing and Configuring Moodle Go Ahead, Experiment Using This Chapter Accessing the Site Variables and Site Settings Pages Installing Moodle Installation Step 1: The Web Server How Much Hosting Service Do You Need?

Installation Step 2: Subdomains Installation Step 3: Getting and Unpacking Moodle Which Version? Which Format?

Installation Step 4: The Moodle Data Directory Installation Step 5: Creating the Moodle Database Installation Step 6: Setting up the Cron Job Installation Step 7: The Installer Script Installation Step 7a: Run install.php Installation Step 7b: Specify Settings for config.php Installation Step 7c: Database Tables Created by install.php Installation Step 7d: Specify Site Variables

Installation Step 8: Upgrading the Database and Setting Up Tables Installation Step 9: Site Settings Full Site Name Short Name for Site Front Page Description Front Page Format

ii

23 24 24

31 31 32 32 33 34 34

35 36 36 37

40 40 42 43 43 43 46 46

60 60 61 61 62 62

Table of Contents

Configuration Choices after Installation Filters Auto-Linking Filters Math Filters Email Protection Filter Multimedia Plugins Multi-Language Content Filter Uploaded files

Backup Authentication Enrolment Choices External Database Flat File Internal Enrolment Paypal

Summary

Chapter 3: Creating Categories and Courses Using Course Categories and the User Experience Creating Course Categories Organizing Course Categories Putting a Course into Several Categories Creating Courses The Course Settings Page Category Full Name and Short Name ID Number Summary Format Course Start Date Enrolment Period Number of Weeks/Topics Using Group Mode Availability Use Enrollment Keys to Regulate Access Guest Access Cost Hidden Sections News Items to Show Show Grades and Show Activity Reports

66 66 66 67 67 67 67 68

68 68 69 69 71 71 71

72

73 73 74 75 75 76 77 77 77 78 78 79 85 86 86 87 88 88 88 89 89 91 92

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Table of Contents

Maximum Upload Size Words for Teacher and Student Force Language

Adding Teachers and Students Blocks The Standard Blocks Activities Administration Calendar Course Summary Courses Latest News Login Main Menu Online Users People Recent Activity Remote RSS Feeds Search Section Links Upcoming Events

Summary

Chapter 4: Adding Static Course Material What Kinds of Static Course Material can be Added? The Resource Summary Activities Block Encourages Exploration Files Why Upload Files? File Types Linking to Uploaded Files Why Use Uploaded Files? Text Page Formatting Moodle Auto-Format: for Quick, Limited Formatting Plain Text Format: for Program Listings Markdown Format: Intuitive, Fast Formatting

Window Settings When to Open Pages in a New Window?

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92 92 92

93 93 94 94 94 97 97 99 100 100 101 102 102 103 103 104 105 107

107

109 109 110 112 113 113 114 114 116 117 117 117 118 118

118 118

Table of Contents

Web Page Advantages of Using HTML View When Editing Web Pages Composing in an HTML Editor and Uploading to Moodle Learn More about HTML Link When to Use a Link versus a Web Page Directory Why Use a Directory? Label Summary

Chapter 5: Adding Interactive Course Material Assignments Printer-Friendly Directions Make it Clear Assignments are Mandatory Choices Journal Lesson The Lesson Settings General Grade Options Flow Control Lesson Formatting Access Control Other

Question Pages The Flow of Pages Question Pages without Questions

The View All Pages Link Testing the Questions and Navigation Editing and Rearranging Questions Adding Questions Adding a Branch Table and Branch End

Quizzes Quiz Settings A Word about Security

Question Categories Managing the Proliferation of Questions and Categories Creating a Question

119 120 121 122 122 123 125 126 126 127

129 130 131 132 132 134 134 136 136 137 137 138 138 139

139 141 141

142 143 143 143 143

144 144 147

147 148 148 v

Table of Contents

Types of Questions Multiple Choice True/False Short Answer Numerical Calculated Matching Description Random Short-Answer Matching Random Embedded Answers

SCORM Survey Creating a Survey Survey Types COLLES ATTLS Critical Incidents

148 149 149 149 149 149 150 150 150 150 150

151 153 153 153 153 154 154

When to Use the Different Types of Surveys Summary

155 155

Chapter 6: Adding Social Course Material

157

Chat Chat Security Chat Times Archiving Chats Forum Discussion Equals Topic Using a Forum to Send Mass Emails Multiple Forums Glossary Adding Glossary Entries Global versus Local Glossary Main and Secondary Glossaries Wiki Using Wiki Type and Group Mode to Determine Who Can Edit a Wiki Wiki Markup versus HTML Mode Enabling the Uploading of Binary Files When to Use CamelCase Linking Student Admin Options Page Name and Initial Page vi

157 158 158 158 158 159 159 160 160 160 161 162 162 162 163 163 164 164 164

Table of Contents

Workshop Workshop Strategies Peer Assessment of Assignments Timing of Submissions and Assessments

Creating a Workshop Workshop Fields Title and Description Grade for Assessments and Grade for Submission Grading Strategy Number of Comments, Assessment Elements, Grade Bands, Criterion Statements, or Categories in Rubric Allow Resubmissions Number of Assessments of Examples from Teacher Comparison of Assessments Number of Assessments of Student Submissions Weight for Teacher Assessments Over Allocation Self Assessment Assessments must be Agreed Hide Grades before Agreement League Table of Submitted Work Hide Names from Students Use Password and Password Maximum Size Start and End of Submissions/Assessments Release Teacher Grades Group Mode Visible to Students

Summary

Chapter 7: Welcoming Your Students First Impression: Login Page, Front Page, or Your Page? Customizing the Login Page Customizing the Front Page Front Page Blocks Activities Administration Calendar Front Page Description Courses Latest News

164 166 166 166

166 167 167 167 168 170 170 171 171 171 171 172 172 172 173 173 173 173 173 173 173 173 173

174

175 175 177 178 179 179 180 181 182 184 185 vii

Table of Contents

Login Main Menu Online Users People Recent Activity Search Upcoming Events

Combining Anonymous, Guest, and Registered Access Security Options Available to You Look and Feel Themes: Customize Colors and Styles Custom Logo Custom Header and Footer Customizing the Header Customizing the Footer

Custom Icons Custom Strings Summary

Chapter 8: Features for Teachers Logs: Where Are They Stored? Moodle's Logs Page Export Logs using phpMyAdmin Using Scales for Feedback, Rating, and Grading Applying a Scale to an Activity Establishing Custom Scales Grades Viewing Grades Categorizing Grades Creating and Viewing Categories Using Extra Credit Grading on a Curve When to use Curve and When to use Weight Compensate for a Difficult or Easy Category by Weighting Grades Weight Dropping the Lowest Scores in a Category Giving Bonus Points Hide Ungraded Activities

Points, Percents, and Letter Grades

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185 186 187 188 188 188 189

189 189 190 191 193 193 193 194

195 195 196

197 197 198 199 201 202 203 204 204 206 206 207 209 210 210 210 211 211 212

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Table of Contents

The Teacher Forum Summary

Chapter 9: Extending and Administering Moodle Add-On Modules Getting Modules Installing Modules Managing Modules Creative Usage of Backup and Restore What Gets Backed Up? Moodle Backup versus Database Backup versus Directory Backup Automated Backups of Your Site Choosing a Backup Location

Backing Up the Database Using phpMyAdmin to Back up the Database Backing Up the Moodle Directories Create a Disaster Recovery Plan Create Different Versions of a Course Summary

213 214

215 215 215 216 218 219 219 221 221 223

223 223 226 227 227 228

Appendix A: The Checklist

229

Index

233

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Preface This book shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance your teaching. Initially, it will help you to analyze your students' requirements, and understand what Moodle can do for them. After that you'll see how to use different features of Moodle to meet your course goals. The social constructionist learning philosophy is at the heart of Moodle: we all construct knowledge through interaction with one another and with learning materials in a social way. This book will show you how to add static learning material, interactive activities, and social features to your courses so that students reach their learning potential. Whether you want to support traditional class teaching or lecturing, or provide complete online and distance learning courses, this book will prove a powerful resource throughout your use of Moodle.

What You Need for This Book • • • •

Access to a server capable of running Moodle, or a server with Moodle installed already. A computer with Internet access. Instructor or administrator access to Moodle, if it's installed already. A fairly new web browser (anything less than 18 months old should be fine).

Who is This Book For? This book is for anyone who wants to make the most of Moodle's features to produce an interactive online learning experience. If you're an educator, corporate trainer, or just someone with something to teach, this book can guide you through the installation, configuration, creation, and management of a Moodle site. It is suitable for people who perform the task of creating and setting up the learning site, and for those who create and deliver courses on the site. That is, it is for site administrators, course creators, and teachers.

Preface

Conventions In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning. There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive." A block of code will be set as follows:

You will be redirected to the script in



When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold: You will be redirected to the script in



New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen". Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

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Preface

Customer Support Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

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Questions You can contact us at [email protected] if you are having a problem with some aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.

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1 Introduction Moodle is a free learning management system that enables you to create powerful, flexible, and engaging online learning experiences. I use the phrase "online learning experiences" instead of "online courses" deliberately. The phrase "online course" often connotes a sequential series of web pages, some images, maybe a few animations, and a quiz put online. There might be some email or bulletin board communication between the teacher and students. However, online learning can be much more engaging than that. Moodle's name gives you insight into its approach to e-learning. From the official Moodle documentation: The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course. Anyone who uses Moodle is a Moodler. The phrase "online learning experience" connotes a more active, engaging role for the students and teachers. It connotes web pages that can be explored in any order, courses with live chats among students and teachers, forums where users can rate messages on their relevance or insight, online workshops that enable students to collaborate and evaluate each other's work, impromptu polls that let the teacher evaluate what students think of a course's progress, directories set aside for students to upload and share their files. All of these features create an active learning environment, full of different kinds of student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction. This is the kind of user experience that Moodle excels at, and the kind that this book will help you to create.

Introduction

A Plan for Creating Your Learning Site Whether you are the site creator or a course creator, you can use this book as you would a project plan. As you work your way through each chapter, the book provides guidance on making decisions that meet your goals for your learning site. This helps you to create the kind of learning experience you want for your teachers (if you're the site creator) or students (if you're the teacher). You can also use this book as a traditional reference manual, but its main advantages are its step-by-step, project-oriented approach and the guidance it gives you about creating an interactive learning experience. Moodle is designed to be intuitive to use and its online help is well written. It does a good job of telling you how to use each of its features. What Moodle's help files don't tell you is when and why to use each feature, and what effect it will have on the student experience; and that is what this book supplies. The appendix contains a checklist of the major steps for creating a Moodle site and populating it with courses. The steps are cross-referenced to the relevant sections of this book. Download this checklist from the Packt Publishing website (http://www.packtpub.com), print it, and keep it handy while creating your Moodle site.

Step-By-Step: Using Each Chapter When you create a Moodle learning site, you usually follow a defined series of steps. This book is arranged to support that process. Each chapter shows you how to get the most from each step. Each step is listed below, with a brief description of the chapter that supports the step. As you work your way through each chapter, your learning site will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a complete, interactive learning site. As you learn more about what Moodle can do, and see your courses taking shape, you may want to change some things you did in previous chapters. Moodle offers you this flexibility. And, this book helps you determine how those changes will cascade throughout your site.

6

Chapter 1

Step 1: Learn About the Moodle Experience (Chapter 1) Every Learning Management System (LMS) has a paradigm, or approach, that shapes the user experience and encourages a certain kind of usage. An LMS might encourage very sequential learning by offering features that enforce a given order on each course. It might discourage student-to-student interaction by offering few features that support it, while encouraging solo learning by offering many opportunities for the student to interact with the course material. In this chapter, you will learn what Moodle can do and what kind of user experience your students and teachers will have, using Moodle. You will also learn about the Moodle philosophy, and how it shapes the user experience. With this information, you'll be ready to decide how to make the best use of Moodle's many features, and to plan your online learning site.

Step 2: Install and Configure Moodle (Chapter 2) Most of the decisions you make while installing and configuring Moodle will affect the user experience. Not just students and teachers, but also course creators and site administrators are affected by these decisions. While Moodle's online help does a good job of telling you how to install and configure the software, it doesn't tell you how the settings you choose affect the user experience. Chapter 2 covers the implications of these decisions, and helps you configure the site so that it behaves in the way you envision.

Step 3: Create the Framework for Your Learning Site (Chapter 3) In Moodle, every course belongs to a category. Chapter 3 takes you through creating course categories, and then creating courses. Just as you chose site-wide settings during installation and configuration, you choose course-wide settings while creating each course. This chapter tells you the implications of the various course settings so that you can create the experience you want for each course. Finally, Chapter 3 takes you through the usage of the various blocks, each of which adds a well-defined function to the site or to the course. After creating the categories and courses, and deciding which blocks to use, you've created a framework for your site. Then you're ready to fill your courses with learning material, which you'll do in Steps 4 through 6.

Step 4: Add Basic Course Material (Chapter 4) In most online courses, the core material consists of web pages that the students view. These pages can contain text, graphics, movies, sound files, games, exercises: anything that can appear on the World Wide Web can appear on a Moodle web page. Chapter 4 covers adding web pages to Moodle courses, plus other kinds of static course material: plain-text pages, links to other websites, labels, and directories of files. This chapter also helps you determine when to use each of these types of material. 7

Introduction

Step 5: Make Your Courses Interactive (Chapter 5) In this context, "interactive" means interaction between the student and teacher, or the student and an active web page. Student-to-student interaction is covered in the next step. Interactive course material includes surveys posed by the teacher, journals written by the student and read only by the teacher, and lessons that guide students through a defined path based upon their answers to review questions and quizzes. Chapter 5 tells you how to create these interactions, and how each of them affects the student and teacher experience. You'll need this information to help you manage Moodle's interactive features.

Step 6: Make Your Course Social (Chapter 6) Social course material enables student-to-student interaction. Moodle enables you to add chats, forums, and Wikis to your courses. These types of interactions will be familiar to many students. You can also create glossaries that are site-wide and specific to a single course. Students can add to the glossaries. Finally, Moodle offers a powerful workshop tool, which enables students to view and evaluate each others work. Each of these interactions makes the course more interesting, but also more complicated for the teacher to manage. Chapter 6 helps you to make the best use of Moodle's social features. The result is a course that encourages students to contribute, share, and evaluate.

Step 7: Create a Welcome for New and Existing Students (Chapter 7) Chapter 7 helps you create a public face for your Moodle site. You can show a Login Page or the Front Page of your site. The content and behavior of the login and Front Pages can be customized. You can choose to allow anonymous users, require students to be registered, or use a combination of guest and registered access. Each of these options affects the kind of welcome that new and existing students get, when they first see your site. Chapter 7 helps you determine which options to use, and to combine them to get the effect you desire.

Step 8: Use Teacher's Tools to Deliver and Administer Courses (Chapter 8) Moodle offers several tools to help teachers administer and deliver courses. It keeps detailed access logs that enable teachers to see exactly what content students accessed, and when. It also enables teachers to establish custom grading scales, which are available site-wide or for a single course. Student grades can be accessed online and also downloaded to a spreadsheet program. Finally, teachers can collaborate in special forums (bulletin boards) reserved just for them.

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Chapter 1

Step 9: Extend Moodle (Chapter 9) Because Moodle is open source, new modules are constantly being developed and contributed by the Moodle community. The modules that are part of Moodle's core distribution are covered in this book. Additional modules extend Moodle's capabilities. While this book cannot cover every module available, it can cover the process of installing and integrating new modules into your site. One of the modules included with the core distribution is a PayPal module. Chapter 9 covers using this module for pay sites. This chapter also covers backing up and restoring the entire site, individual courses, and components within a course.

The Moodle Philosophy Moodle is designed to support a style of learning called Social Constructionist Pedagogy. This style of learning is interactive. The social constructionist philosophy believes that people learn best when they interact with the learning material, construct new material for others, and interact with other students about the material. The difference between a traditional class and the social constructionist philosophy is the difference between a lecture and a discussion. Moodle does not require you to use the social constructionist method for your courses. However, it best supports this method. For example, Moodle enables you to add five kinds of static course material. This is course material that a student reads, but does not interact with: • • • • •

A text page A web page A link to anything on the Web (including material on your Moodle site) A view into one of the course's directories A label that displays any text or image

However, Moodle also enables you to add six types of interactive course material. This is course material that a student interacts with, by answering questions, entering text, or uploading files: • • • • • •

Assignment (uploading files to be reviewed by the teacher and/or students) Choice (a single question) Journal (an online journal) Lesson (a conditional, branching activity) Quiz (an online test) Survey (with results available to the teacher and/or students) 9

Introduction

Moodle also offers five kinds of activities where students interact with each other. These are used to create social course material: • • • • •

Chat (live online chat between students) Forum (you can choose the number of online bulletin boards for each course) Glossary (students and/or teachers can contribute terms to site-wide glossaries) Wiki (Wikis can be inserted into courses, or a Wiki can be the entire course) Workshop (workshops support collaborative, graded efforts among students)

That's five kinds of static course material, and eleven kinds of interactive course material. In addition, some of Moodle's add-on modules add even more types of interaction. For example, one add-on module enables students and teachers to schedule appointments with each other.

The Moodle Experience Because Moodle encourages interaction and exploration, your students' learning experience will often be nonlinear. Conversely, Moodle has few features for enforcing a specific order upon a course. For example, there is no feature in Moodle that would require a student to complete Course 101 before allowing the student to enroll in Course 102. Instead, you would need to manually enroll the student in each course. Also, there is no Moodle feature that would require a student to complete Topic 1 in a course before allowing the student to see Topic 2. If you wanted to enforce that kind of linear course flow, you would need to manually place the student into the group that is authorized to view Topic 1, and then upon completion, place the student in to the group that is authorized to view Topics 1 and 2, and so on. As a site administrator or teacher, enforcing a linear path through a course catalogue, or through the material in an individual course, often requires manual intervention. However, if you design your site with Moodle's nonlinear style in mind, you will find it offers you great flexibility and the ability to create engaging online courses. In this section, I'll take you on a tour of a Moodle learning site. You will see the student's experience from the time the student arrives at the site, enters a course, and works through some material in the course. You will also see some student-to-student interaction, and some functions used by the teacher to manage the course. Along the way, I'll point out many of the features that you will learn to implement in this book, and how the demo site uses those features.

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Chapter 1

The Moodle Front Page The Front Page of your site is the first thing most visitors will see. This section takes you on a tour of the Front Page of my demonstration site.

Arriving at the Site When a potential student arrives at the demonstration learning site, the student sees the Front Page. Later in this book, you'll learn to control what an anonymous visitor to your learning site sees on the Front Page. You can even require the visitor to register and log in before seeing any part of your site. Like most sites, my demonstration site allows anonymous visitors to see a lot of information about the site:

One of the first things a visitor will notice is the announcement at the top and centre of the page, Desert Plants Course Added. Below the announcement are two activities: a quiz, Win a Prize: Test Your Wilderness Knowledge, and a chat room, Global Chat Room. Selecting either of these activities will require to the student to register with the site:

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Introduction

Anonymous, Guest, and Registered Access Notice the line Some courses may allow guest access at the middle of the page. You can set three levels of access for your entire site, and for individual courses: Anonymous access allows anyone to access the site or course. Guest access requires the user to login as guest. This enables you to track usage, by looking at the statistics for the user guest. But since everyone is logged in as the user guest, you can't track individual users. Registered access requires the user to register on your site. You can allow people to register with or without email confirmation, require a special code for enrolment, and/or manually create/confirm their accounts.

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Chapter 1

The Main Menu Returning to the Front Page, notice the Main menu in the upper left corner. This menu consists of three documents that tell the user what the site is about, and how to use it.

In Moodle, icons tell the user what kind of resource will be accessed by a link. In this case, the icon tells the user these are web or text pages. Course materials that a student observes or reads, such as web or text pages, hyperlinks, and multimedia files are called Resources. In Chapter 4, you will learn how to add Resources to a course.

Blocks Below the Main menu is a Calendar and the Upcoming Events. These are Blocks, which you can choose to add to the Front Page and to each course individually.

Other blocks display a summary of the current course, a list of courses available on the site, the latest news that is online, and other information. In the lower right of the Front Page you see the Login block. Chapter 3 tells you how to use these blocks. You can add these blocks to the Front Page of your site because the Front Page is essentially a course. Anything that you can add to course—such as Resources and Blocks, can be added to the Front Page.

13

Introduction

Site Description On the right side of the Front Page you see a Site Description. This is optional. If this were a course, you could choose to display the Course Description.

The Site or Course Description can contain anything that you can put on a web page. It is essentially a block of HTML code that is put onto the Front Page.

Available Courses You can choose to display available courses on the Front Page of your site. In the Demonstration site, I've created a category for Free Courses and another for Wild Plants. Free courses allow anonymous users to enter. Courses in other categories require users to register.

Clicking on the information icon next to each course displays the Course Description. Clicking on a course name takes you into the course. If the course allows anonymous access, you are taken directly into the course. If the course allows guest access, or requires registration, you are taken to the Login screen.

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Chapter 1

Inside a Course Now let us take a look inside the course.

Breadcrumbs In the screenshot given previously, the user has logged in as guest and entered the Basic Botany course. We know this from the breadcrumb trail at the top left of the screen, which tells us the name of the site and of the course. In the upper right, we see a confirmation that the user has logged in under the name guest.

Blocks Like the Front Page, this course displays the Calendar and Upcoming Events blocks. It also displays blocks for the Latest news, People, Activities, and Course categories. The Activities block lists all of the types of Activities and Resources that are in this course. Clicking on a link will display that type of activity. For example, clicking Quizzes displays this screen:

15

Introduction

Notice the breadcrumbs at the top now indicate the site name, course name, and that you are viewing the quizzes in the course. The course is organized by Topic, and the number of each Topic is displayed in the left column. Because the user is logged in as guest, and many users can use that ID, the Best grade column is not meaningful here. It indicates only the highest grade for everyone who has ever attempted this quiz with guest access. Clicking on the name of a quiz takes the user to that quiz. Clicking on Wild Plants 1, takes the user back to the course. Earlier, I commented on the nonlinear nature of most Moodle courses. Notice that even though the user has not completed Topic 1, the quizzes for Topic 2 and 3 are open to the user. Also, looking at the Activities block, you can see that all of the resources for this course are available to the user at all times.

Topics Moodle also enables you to organize a course by Week, in which case each section is labeled with a date instead of a number. Or, you can choose to make your course a single, large discussion forum.

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Chapter 1

17

Introduction

Most courses are organized by Topic. Notice that the first topic, which I've labeled Welcome, is not numbered. Moodle gives you a Topic 0 to use as the course introduction. Course creators can hide and show topics at will. Teachers can be given course creator rights to a course, so that the teachers can also show/hide topics as the course progresses. Topics are the lowest level of organization in Moodle. The hierarchy is Site | Course Category | Course Subcategory (optional) | Course | Topic. Every item in your course belongs to a Topic, even if your course consists of only Topic 0.

Join a Discussion Clicking on Course Discussion, under Group Activities, takes the student to the course-wide forum. You can see in this screenshot that the teacher started with the first post. Then William Rice left a test message, and a student replied to the original post:

That test message doesn't serve our students. Fortunately, the teacher has editing rights to this forum, and so he or she can delete posts at will. The teacher can also rate posts for their relevance, as shown next:

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Chapter 1

Because Moodle supports an interactive, collaborative style of learning, students can also be given the ability to rate forum posts and material submitted by other students. You'll find out more about forums in Chapter 6.

Complete a Workshop Next, the student will enter a workshop called Observing the Familiar.

19

Introduction

In this workshop, the student writes and updates some defined observations. These observations are then rated by other students in the course. When the student first enters the workshop, he or she sees directions for completing the workshop. After reading these directions, the student continues to the workshop submission form:

Notice the online word processor that the student uses to write the assignment. This gives the student basic WYSIWYG features. The same word processor appears when course creators create web pages, when students write Journal entries, and other times when a user is editing and formatting text.

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Chapter 1

At the top of the page, you can see that this workshop has opening and closing dates for submissions, and for assessments. It also has a maximum point value of 16. When the students assess each others' work, they will see the evaluation criteria and how many points each criterion is worth. If you're able to read Step 5 in the workshop directions above, you can see that the student should return to this workshop every few days to update this assignment. To enable this, the course creator used a feature that allows students to resubmit workshops. The course creator could have chosen to allow a single submission, instead.

Assessing Other Students' Work In the previous subsection you saw how a student submits an assignment to a workshop. After each of the students submits an assignment, the student is given a chance to assess other students' work. In the following screenshot, Student Number2 has just submitted an assignment, and now can assess Student 1's work. Student 2 would begin the assessment by clicking on the Assess link.

I

Under Your assessments of work by your peers, you can see that this user has not yet assessed anyone else's work. Under Your Submissions, you can see the title of this user's submission, and that no one has yet assessed the submission.

21

Introduction

The Specimen Assessment Form at the top of the page displays the form that the student will use to assess others' work. However, it is a sample form, so it does not affect anyone's assessment.

Clicking the Assess link brings up the assessment form for Student 1's workshop submission. The current user, Student 2, uses this form to assess the work. The teacher will have the opportunity to grade Student 2's assessment of Student 1's workshop. So not only does Moodle give you the ability to grade students' work, but also the ability to grade their assessments of other students' work. Because Moodle emphasizes collaborative effort, there are several places where a teacher can grade students on the quality of their collaboration.

Editing Mode Let us see what happens when you turn on the editing mode to make changes.

Normal versus Editing Mode When an anonymous user or a registered student browses your learning site, Moodle displays pages normally. However, when someone with course creator privilege logs in, Moodle offers a button for switching into Editing mode:

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Chapter 1

Clicking Turn editing on puts Moodle into Editing mode:

Normal Mode

Editing Mode

The Edit Icon Clicking the Edit icon enables you to edit whatever that icon follows. In this example, clicking the Edit icon that follows the paragraph enables you to edit the announcement. Clicking the Edit icon next to the quiz Win a Prize, takes you into the editing window for that quiz. In that window, you can create, add, and remove quiz questions; change the grading scheme; and apply other settings to the quiz.

The Delete Icon Clicking the Delete icon deletes whatever item that the icon follows. If you want to remove an item from a course, but you're not sure if you'll want to use it later, don't delete the item. Instead, hide it from view. Hiding and showing is explained next.

23

Introduction

The Hidden/Shown Icons I call these the Hidden/Shown icons / instead of Hide/Show because the icons indicate the current state of an item, instead of indicating what will happen when you click on them. The Hidden icon indicates that an item is hidden from the students. Clicking it shows the item to the students. The Show icon indicates that an item is shown for the students. Clicking it hides the item from the students. If you want to remove an item from a course while keeping it for later use, or if you want to keep an item hidden from students while you're working on it, hide it instead of deleting it.

The Group Icons These icons indicate what Group Mode has been applied, to an item. Groups are explained in a later chapter. For now, you should know that you can control access to items based upon what Group a student belongs to. Clicking these icons enables you to change that setting.

Resources and Activities Course materials that a student observes or reads—such as web or text pages, hyperlinks, and multimedia files—are called Resources. Now let us see how to add some Resources and Activities to your Moodle site. In Editing Mode, you can add Resources and Activities to a course. In general, a Resource is an item that the student views but does not interact with, such as a web page, hyperlink, or directory of files. An Activity is an item that the student interacts with, or that enables interaction between students. Moodle offers more Activities than Resources, such as Chat, Forum, Journal, Quiz, Wiki, and more.

Adding Resources and Activities You add Resources and Activities using the drop-down menus that appear in Editing Mode:

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Chapter 1

Selecting an item brings you to the Editing window for that type of item. For example, selecting Link to a file or web site displays the window above. Notice that you can do much more than just specify a hyperlink. You can give this link a user-friendly name and a summary description, open it in a new window, and more. Almost every Resource and Activity that you add to Moodle has a Summary. This Summary appears when a student selects the item. Also, if the item appears in a list (for example, a list of all the Links in a course), the Summary is displayed. When building courses, you will spend most of your time in the Editing windows for the items that you add. You will find their behavior and appearance to be very consistent. The presence of a Summary is one example of that consistency. Another example is the presence of the Help icon next to the title of the window. Clicking this icon displays an explanation of this type of item.

25

Introduction

The Administration Block The Administration block displays only when someone with administration or course creator privileges has logged in. The choices on this block change according to whether you are viewing the Front Page or a course, and according to what privileges you have. The block on the left appears on the Front Page of my site. Notice that several choices appear to be for site-wide functions, such as Configuration, Courses, and Site files. Clicking the Admin link takes you to the Administration page for the entire site, which offers the choices on this block and more. The block on the right appears in a course on my site. Choices in this block affect only the current course. For example, selecting Logs from the Front Page displays a page where you can view logs for all site activity, while selecting it from the course displays logs for just that course.

And Much More This short tour introduced you to the basics of the Moodle experience. The following chapters take you through installing Moodle and creating courses. If you work through those chapters in order, you will discover many features not mentioned in this tour. And, because Moodle is open source, new features can be added at any time. Perhaps you will be the one to contribute a new feature to the Moodle community. Without delay, let's get started building your site.

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Chapter 1

The Moodle Architecture Moodle runs on any web server that supports the PHP programming language, and a database. It works best, and there is more support, when running on the Apache web server with a MySQL database. These requirements, Apache, PHP, and MySQL are common to almost all commercial web hosts, even the lowest-cost ones. The Moodle learning management system resides in three places on your web host: • • •

The application occupies one directory, with many subdirectories for the various modules. Data files students and teachers upload—such as photos and assignments submitted by students—reside in the Moodle data directory. Course material that you create with Moodle (web pages, quizzes, workshops, lessons, etc.), grades, user information, and user logs reside in the Moodle database.

The Moodle Application Directory The screenshot on the following page shows you my Moodle application directory. Without even knowing much about Moodle, you can guess the function of several directories. For example, the admin directory holds the PHP code that creates the administrative pages, the lang directory holds translations of the Moodle interface, and the mod directory holds the various modules:

27

Introduction

The index.php file is the Moodle home page. If a student were browsing my Moodle site, the first page the student would read is the file http://moodle.williamrice.com/index.php.

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Chapter 1

In my site, the free course "Basic Botany for Foragers" happens to be course number 4. Only the Moodle system knows it as course number 4; we know it as "Basic Botany for Foragers". When a student enters that course, the URL in the student's browser reads http://moodle.williamrice.com/moodle/course/view.php?id=4. In the previous screenshot above, you can see that /course is one of the directories in my Moodle installation. As the user navigates around the site, different .php pages do the work of presenting information. Because each of Moodle's core components and modules is in its own subdirectory, the software can be easily updated by replacing old files with newer ones. You should periodically check the http://www.moodle.org website for news about updates and bug fixes.

The Moodle Data Directory Moodle stores files uploaded by the users in a data directory. This directory should not be accessible to the general public over the Web. That is, you should not be able to type in the URL for this directory and access it using a web browser. You can protect it either by using an .htaccess file or by placing the directory outside the web server's documents directory. In my installation, the previous screenshot shows you that the web document directory for moodle.williamrice.com is /www/moodle. Therefore, I placed the data directory outside of /www/moodle, in /www/moodledata:

On my server, the directory /www/moodledata corresponds to the subdomain www.moodledata.williamrice.com. This subdomain is protected from open access by an .htaccess file. The directory /www/www corresponds to the root domain, www.williamrice.com.

29

Introduction

The Moodle Database While the Moodle data directory stores files uploaded by students, the Moodle database stores most of the information in your Moodle site. The database stores objects that you create using Moodle. For example, Moodle enables you to create web pages for your courses. These web pages' actual HTML code is stored in the database. Links that you add to a course, the settings and content of forums and Wikis, and quizzes created with Moodle are all examples of data stored in the Moodle database. The three parts of Moodle—the application, data directory, and database—work together to create your learning site. Chapter 9 talks about backing up and disaster recovery, which is an obvious application of this knowledge. However, knowing how the three parts work together is also helpful when upgrading, troubleshooting, and moving your site between servers.

Summary Moodle encourages exploration and interaction between/among students and teachers. As a course designer and teacher, you will have the most tools at your disposal if you work with this tendency, and make your learning experiences as interactive as possible. Creating courses with forums, peer-assessed workshops, journals, surveys, and interactive lessons is more work than creating a course from a series of static web pages. However, it is also more engaging and effective, and you will find it worth the effort to use Moodle's many interactive features. When teaching an online course in Moodle, remember that Moodle enables you to add, move, and modify course material and grading tools on-the-fly. If it's permitted by your institution's policies, don't hesitate to change a course in response to student needs. Finally, learn the basics of Moodle's architecture, and at least read over the Installation and Configuration in Chapter 2. Don't be afraid of the technology. If you can master the difficult art of teaching, you can master using Moodle to its full potential.

30

2 Installing and Configuring Moodle The title of this chapter makes it sound as if it applies only to the person who installs Moodle. If your system administrator or webmaster has installed Moodle for you, you might be tempted to skip this chapter. Don't! Many of the configuration choices that are made during the installation process affect the student and teacher experience in Moodle. These are found on the Variables and Site Settings pages, which will be covered later in this chapter. This chapter's focus is on helping you create the user experience you want by making the right configuration choices. While someone else may have installed Moodle and made these configuration choices for you, you can always go back and change them.

Go Ahead, Experiment While this chapter describes the effects of different configuration choices, there is no substitute for experiencing them yourself. Don't be afraid to experiment with different settings. You can try this method: 1. Install two different browsers in your computer. For example, Internet Explorer and Firefox. 2. In one browser, log in as an administrator. Go to the Site Settings or Variables page (I will tell you how), and experiment with the settings that you read about here. 3. In the other browser, go to your site as a user—an anonymous visitor, student, or teacher. Each time you change a configuration setting, refresh the user's browser and observe the change to your site.

Installing and Configuring Moodle

Using This Chapter If you did not install Moodle, you should at least read the following sections later in this chapter: •

• •

Installation Step 7d: Specify Site Variables. The site variables described affect how the site functions. Some of them affect the user experience, and others affect the teachers and course creators. Configuration Choices after Installation. Most of these configuration choices affect the student experience, and some affect the teachers and course creators. If you want, work with your system administrator to select the settings you want. Your administrator can create a site administrator account that you can use for this.

Moodle's online installation instructions provide a good step-by-step reference for installing Moodle. However, they do not cover the implications of the choices you make while configuring Moodle. This chapter covers the effects of the: • • •

Choices you make while installing Moodle Choices you make immediately after installing Moodle Ways of authenticating Moodle users, and how your choice affects the operation of your site

Accessing the Site Variables and Site Settings Pages The fastest way to access the Variables and Site Settings pages is to: 1. Log in to Moodle with an administrator account. 2. In your browser bar, enter the URL of your site and add /admin. For example, moodle.williamrice.com/admin. 3. The Administration page displays. From here, you can select Variables or Site Settings.

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Chapter 2

Installing Moodle Installing Moodle consists of: 1. Obtaining space and rights on a web server that has the capabilities needed to run Moodle 2. Creating the subdomains and/or directories needed for Moodle and its data 3. Getting and unpacking Moodle, and uploading it to your web server 4. Creating the data directory 5. Creating the Moodle database 6. Setting up the cron job 7. Activating the installation routine and specifying settings for your Moodle site 33

Installing and Configuring Moodle

Each of these is covered in the following sections. The official Moodle website, http://moodle.org/, contains detailed installation instructions. These instructions might change slightly with each version, or be occasionally updated. The material in this chapter supplements and expands on those directions. You should use the official Moodle installation directions, supplemented with this material.

Installation Step 1: The Web Server Moodle is run from a web server. You upload or place Moodle in your directory on the server. Usually, the server is someone else's computer. If you're a teacher, or are in the corporate world, your institution might have their own web server. If you're an individual or have a small business, you will probably buy web-hosting services from another company. In either case, we are assuming that you have an account on a web server that offers Apache, PHP, and MySQL. If you must install your own Apache web server and MySQL software, the easiest way to do so is to use another open-source tool: XAMPP from http://www.apachefriends.org. Apache Friends is a non-profit project to promote the Apache web server. XAMPP is an easy, all-in-one installer that installs Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl. It is available for Linux, Windows, Mac, and Solaris.

How Much Hosting Service Do You Need? With only a few dozen students, Moodle runs fine on a modest web-hosting service. At this time, many hosting companies offer services that can run a small Moodle installation for less than $10 a month. Base your decision upon the factors discussed below.

Disk Space A fresh Moodle installation will occupy about 60MB of disk space, which is not much. Most of the space will be occupied by content that is added while users create and take courses. Base your decision about how much space to obtain upon the kinds of courses you plan to deliver. If the courses will contain mostly text and a few graphics, you'll need less space than if they contain music and video files. Also, consider the disk space occupied by files that the students will upload. Will students upload small word processing files? Large graphics? Huge multimedia files? When determining how much disk space you will need, consider the size of the files that your courses will serve and that your students will submit.

Bandwidth Moodle is a web-based product, so course content and assignments are added over the Web. Whenever a reader or user connects to a website, they're using bandwidth. When a user reads a page on your Moodle site, downloads a video, or uploads a paper, he or she uses some of your bandwidth. Most commercial hosting services include a fixed amount 34

Chapter 2

of bandwidth in their service. If your account uses more bandwidth than allowed, some services cut off your site's access. Others keep your site up, but automatically bill you for the additional bandwidth. The second option is preferable in case of unexpected demand. When deciding upon a hosting service, find out how much bandwidth they offer and what they do if you exceed that limit.

Installation Step 2: Subdomains A subdomain is a web address that exists under your web address, and acts like an independent site. For example, my website is www.williamrice.com. I have a subdomain, http://www.moodle.williamrice.com, which holds a demonstration site for this book. They are independent sites. However, they exist on the same server, under the same account, and they both count towards the disk space and bandwidth that I use:

In this example, Moodle is installed in the subdomain http://www.moodle.williamrice.com. Using a subdomain offers me several advantages. As you can see, I can manage them both from the same interface. Second, I can use a subdomain as a test site for my Moodle installation. I can install and test Moodle in the subdomain, and then copy it over to my main site when it's ready. Having a site to test updates and add-ons may be helpful if uninterrupted service is important to you. Later, you'll see how easy it is to copy a Moodle installation to a different location, change a few settings, and have it work. If you want to do this, make sure the hosting service you choose allows subdomains. 35

Installing and Configuring Moodle

Installation Step 3: Getting and Unpacking Moodle Get Moodle from the official website, http://www.moodle.org/. Go to the Download Moodle page and select the version and format that you need:

Which Version? For a new installation, the Latest Stable Branch is usually your best choice. The Last build: information tells you when it was last updated with a bug-fix or patch. This is usually irrelevant to you; the version number determines which features you get, not the build time.

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Which Format? Moodle is downloaded as a single, compressed file. This compressed file contains the many small files and directories that constitute Moodle. After downloading the compressed file, you must decompress (or unzip) the file. Unzipping will extract many files and directories that you must place on your server. If you're using a hosting service, you probably do not have the ability to decompress the file on the server. Instead, you must decompress the file on your PC and then upload the extracted files to the server. If you're using a hosting service, you will probably: 1. Download the Moodle package (ZIP file) to your local hard drive.

2. Decompress, or unzip, the package. This will extract many files from the package. In the example overleaf, you can see from the title bar that I'm using the freeware program ZipGenius to unzip the package. Each file will be extracted to a specific directory. For example, near the bottom of the window, you can see that the file module.php will be extracted to the directory moodle\admin\.

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Installing and Configuring Moodle

3. Upload the files to your web server. You'll need to use a special program to upload the files, which we'll cover later. In this example, I'm using Macromedia Dreamweaver to upload the file help.php from my local PC to my hosting service.

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Whether you're using Windows, Mac, or Linux on your personal computer, you can find a decompression program that will unzip .zip files. If your system doesn't have a decompression program that works with .zip files, and you're using Windows, try www.nonags.com for freeware unzip programs. If you're using a web page editor like Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, your program has the ability to upload files to the server. If you're not using a web page editor that can upload files, you'll need an "FTP client". Again, try www.nonags.com for freeware FTP clients. If your school or company has given you space on its web server, you might have access to the directory just as if it were another folder on your PC. In that case, you can download the .tgz file, put it into your directory on the web server, and then decompress it. Tell the system administrator who gave you access what you want to do, and ask how to decompress a file in your directory.

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Installing and Configuring Moodle

Installation Step 4: The Moodle Data Directory When you run the Moodle install script, the installer asks you to specify a directory in which to store course material. For security, this directory should be outside the main Moodle directory. This gives you two choices: •

•

You can install Moodle into a subdirectory, and the data into another subdirectory. For example, suppose your domain is www.williamrice.com. Your Moodle site might be located in www.williamrice.com/moodle, and the data at www.williamrice.com/moodledata. Alternatively, you can install Moodle into its own domain, and the data into another domain. For example, if you own the domain www.williamrice.com, you could create a subdomain for Moodle at www.moodle.williamrice.com and a subdomain for the course materials at www.moodledata.williamrice.com. This is usually the easiest option.

The two screenshots below illustrate this setup. The screen on the left is when I used my hosting service's control panel to create the moodledata subdirectory. The screen on the right appears while the configuration script runs. By entering /home/williamr/www/moodle, I specified the subdomain http://moodle.williamrice.com as the Moodle Directory. /home/ williamr/www/moodledata specifies the subdomain, http://moodledata.williamrice.com as the Data Directory:

Installation Step 5: Creating the Moodle Database While the moodledata directory stores files uploaded by students, and some larger files, the Moodle database stores most of the information in your Moodle site. By default, the installer uses the database name moodle and the username moodleuser. Using these 40

Chapter 2

default settings gives any hacker a head start on breaking your site. When creating your database, change these to something less common. At least make the hackers guess the name of your database and the database username.

Whatever username you use, that user will need the following privileges for the Moodle database: SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, and ALTER. The screenshot here shows the settings for my demo Moodle database, moodledata. If your hosting service provides you with the popular cPanel control panel for your account, you can use cPanel to create the database and database user. For instructions on using cPanel, see http://www.cpanel.net/docs/cpanel/.

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Installing and Configuring Moodle

Installation Step 6: Setting up the Cron Job Some of Moodle's functions happen on a regular, timed schedule. The most visible example is mailing out notices to the subscribers of a forum that a new message has been posted. A script called cron.php checks periodically to see if new messages have been posted to any forum. If so, the script causes the notice to be emailed to the members of that forum. The script cron.php must be triggered at regular intervals. You can set this interval. The mechanism that triggers the script is called a cron job. Directions for setting up the cron job are in the http://moodle.org/ installation guide. Some web-hosting services allow you to set up cron jobs. If you're buying hosting services, look for one that offers this. If you've been given space on your school's or company's web server, speak to the system administrator about setting up the cron job. If neither of these applies, then your only other option is to set up the cron job on a Windows machine that you control. The cron job will reach out over the Internet to your Moodle site, and activate the script cron.php. Again, directions for this are in the http://moodle.org/ installation guide. However, if you choose this option, you must keep that Windows PC running all the time, and it must also be connected to the Internet at all times. If the Windows PC goes down or offline, the Moodle functions that requires periodic triggering will also go down. The following is a screenshot of installing the MoodleCron application, where I specify the location of the cron.php script. In the following figure, you can see the line Location: /www/moodle/admin, which on my server corresponds to www.moodle.williamrice.com/ admin. This is the directory that holds cron.php.

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Installation Step 7: The Installer Script The installer script walks you step by step through the creation of Moodle's database tables, and setting variables that determine how the site operates. In this section, we discuss how the setting of each variable affects the user experience.

Installation Step 7a: Run install.php In the Moodle directory, a script called install.php creates the Moodle configuration file when the script is run. You run the script by just launching your browser and calling the script. The configuration file, config.php, holds information about your Moodle installation. In the following screenshot, I've launched my browser and accessed install.php on my server:

Installation Step 7b: Specify Settings for config.php Stepping through the install routine creates config.php, among other things. Here's the config.php for www.moodle.williamrice.com:
/// Moodle Configuration File

unset($CFG); $CFG->dbtype $CFG->dbhost $CFG->dbname $CFG->dbuser $CFG->dbpass $CFG->dbpersist $CFG->prefix

= = = = = = =

'mysql'; 'localhost'; 'moodledata'; 'moodleusr'; 'badpassword'; false; 'mdl_';

$CFG->wwwroot

= 'http://moodle.williamrice.com';

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Installing and Configuring Moodle

$CFG->dirroot $CFG->dataroot $CFG->admin

= '/home/williamr/www/moodle'; = '/home/williamr/www/moodledata'; = 'admin';

$CFG->directorypermissions = 00777; Mode

// try 02777 on a server in Safe

require_once("$CFG->dirroot/lib/setup.php"); // MAKE SURE WHEN YOU EDIT THIS FILE THAT THERE ARE NO SPACES, BLANK LINES, // RETURNS, OR ANYTHING ELSE AFTER THE TWO CHARACTERS ON THE NEXT LINE. ?>

This site uses a mysql database. On most servers, the hostname will be localhost. In a previous subsection we covered creating the Moodle database, which in our example we called moodledata. We created a user called moodleusr, with the proper privileges. Note that the configuration file stores the password for the Moodle database, which in this example is badpassword. The dbpersist setting is specified by the installer script; do not change it without a good reason. The prefix mdl_ is added to the beginning of each table that Moodle adds to your database. A table is a section of a database. Think of each table as a database inside a database. On the running of install.php, Moodle adds all the tables it needs to the database that you created. It adds the prefix to the name of each of these tables, so that you (and Moodle) can recognize them when you look at the database. You could use the same database for Moodle and something else, or for two Moodle installations, if each program used its own tables with its own prefix. The different prefixes would prevent the two programs from becoming confused and reading each other's tables. If you're running more than one copy of Moodle, you might consider using the same database and different tables. You could back up the data for both copies by backing up the one database. The settings in the first part of config.php are specified while running the installation script:

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The second part of config.php specifies the directories used by the Moodle application and data: $CFG->wwwroot $CFG->dirroot $CFG->dataroot $CFG->admin

= = = =

'http://moodle.williamrice.com'; '/home/williamr/www/moodle'; '/home/williamr/www/moodledata'; 'admin';

These settings are also specified while running the installation script:

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Installing and Configuring Moodle

Installation Step 7c: Database Tables Created by install.php After stepping through a few more screens, install.php creates the tables in your Moodle database. You don't need to do anything during this part of the installation except click to see the next screen. The installation script tells you when this is complete:

Installation Step 7d: Specify Site Variables After creating the database tables, the installation script displays the Variables page. The values you enter on this page affect the behavior of the entire site. Of course, you want to enter them correctly the first time. However, after Moodle is installed, you can return to this page at any time to change these variables. The next screenshot shows the top of the Variables page for my demonstration site. Notice the breadcrumbs line at the top shows that I'm on the site whose short name is wildskills, and that to get to this page I've selected Administration, then Configuration, and then Variables:

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Chapter 2

The page itself does a good job of explaining the purpose of each variable. However, the directions do not tell you the implications of the choices you make on this page. Below I've added some commentary to help you determine how your choices will affect the operation of your site, and information to help you decide upon the right choices for your needs.

lang and langmenu The default language is specified by the variable lang. This is the language users will see when they first encounter your site. The variable langmenu determines whether users will see a language menu on your Front Page:

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Notice that the site title, in this case Wilderness Skills, does not get translated. Neither does the content that you create. Only menus and field names are translated. In this example, Main menu, Site news, and Subscribe to this forum would be translated. If you want to offer course content in multiple languages, you have several choices. First, you could put all of the different languages into each course. That is, each document would appear in a course in several languages. For example, if you offered a botany course in English and Spanish, you might have a document defining the different types of plants in both English and Spanish, side by side in the same course: Types of Plants or Tipos de Plantaras. While taking the course, students would select the documents in their language. Course names would appear in only one language. Second, you could create separate courses for each language, and offer them on the same site. Course names would appear in each language. In this case, students would select the course in English or Spanish: Basic Botany or Botánica Básica. Third, you could create a separate Moodle site for each language. For example, http://moodle.williamrice.com/english and http://moodle.williamrice.com/ spanish. At the home page of your site, students would select their language and be directed to the correct Moodle installation. In this case, the entire Moodle site would appear in the students' language: the site name, menus, course names, and course content. These are things you should consider before installing Moodle. However, if you decide to change your approach, you can always come back to the Variables page and change these settings. Fourth, and most elegantly, you could use the Multi-Language Content filter described in Configuration Choices after Installation later in this chapter to display course content in the language selected by your user.

langlist As the directions on the Variables page state, leaving this blank will enable your students to pick from all available languages. Entering the names of languages in this field limits the list to only those entered. The directions tell you to enter "language codes". Moodle looks in the /lang directory for subdirectories that hold each language's files. For example, the /lang/en_us subdirectory holds files for the U.S. English translation, and /lang/es_es holds the files for traditional Spanish (Español / España). The name of the subdirectory is the "language code." For example, if you want students to be able to choose between U.S. English and traditional Spanish, enter en_us, es_es into this field. For example, the /lang/en/forum.php file holds text used on the forum pages. This includes text that is displayed to the course creator when creating the forum, and text that is displayed to the students when they use the forum. Here are the first few lines from that file: $string['addanewdiscussion'] = 'Add a new discussion topic'; $string['addanewtopic'] = 'Add a new topic'; $string['advancedsearch'] = 'Advanced search'; 48

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And here are the same first three lines from /lang/es_es/forum.php: $string['addanewdiscussion'] = 'Colocar un nuevo tema de discusión aquí'; $string['addanewtopic'] = 'Agregar un nuevo tema'; $string['advancedsearch'] = 'Búsqueda avanzada';

The biggest task in localizing Moodle consists of translating these language files into the appropriate language. Some translations are surprisingly complete. For example, most of the interface has been translated to Irish Gaelic, even though this language is used daily by only about 350,000 people; the Romanian interface remains mostly untranslated, while Romania has a population of over 23 million. This means that if a Moodle user chooses the Romanian language (ro), most of the interface will still default to English. One of the greatest features of Moodle is that you can edit these language files directly in Moodle. To do this, select Administration | Configuration | Language. For more information about translating Moodle, see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Translation.

locale Enter a language code into this field, and the system displays dates in the format appropriate for that language.

timezone This field determines the time zone for times displayed, such as the last time a file was edited. The time zone entered here is used only for users who have not selected a time zone in their personal profile. Once a user selects a time zone for their profile, times are displayed in the user's time zone.

country Leaving this field blank forces a new student to choose a country on the student's profile page. This could either be interesting or inconvenient for the students. Consider your students' temperament before making your selection.

smtphosts, smtpuser, and smtppass The abbreviation SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It's a protocol, or communications method, used between computers. It describes the method those computers use to exchange email. To find out the name of the SMTP host to use, consult your hosting service or system administrator. It is usually mail@domainname, for example [email protected]. The SMTP username is the first part of a valid email address, on the same server as Moodle. Your hosting service probably allows you to create multiple email addresses. On my hosting service, I created an email address [email protected]. The smtpuser field contains moodle and the smtppass field contains that email address's password.

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noreplyaddress This email address is used as the "reply to" address when Moodle sends an email to which you don't want a response. For example, Moodle can email the members of a forum when a new post is added to the forum. You would not want the members to respond to that notice by using "reply to," because the email comes from Moodle, not an individual who can read the replies. That is one of the times Moodle would use this noreplyaddress. If you have a catch-all email address for your domain, replies sent to noreplyaddress will be caught by the catch-all address. For example, if I designate [email protected] as the catch-all email address for my domain, any message sent to an invalid email address at williamrice.com gets caught by [email protected]. If you don't have a catch-all email address for your domain, messages sent to noreplyaddress will be bounced.

gdversion GD is a collection of open-source programs that can generate graphics, charts, and thumbnails on the fly. This library is installed on your web server. Most hosting services will have the latest version installed. Moodle uses GD to process images. The installation routine usually detects the correct version of GD installed on your server. However, if images do not display properly, try returning to this page and changing the setting. Also contact your system administrator and ask what version of GD is installed.

maxeditingtime This sets the amount of time between when a forum posting or journal entry is submitted, and when it is added to the forum or journal. During this time, the posting or entry can be recalled by the author and edited. As of this writing, Moodle does not have a function specifically for sending emails to all the students in a course. When a teacher wants to send an email to all students in a course, the teacher usually creates a forum and automatically subscribes all students to that forum. Then, the teacher chooses to have new forum postings emailed to all the members. When the teacher posts to the forum, the forum then emails that posting to all the students. The maxeditingtime determines how long the teacher has before that posting is added to the forum and emailed to all the students.

longtimenosee The maximum amount of time you can keep a student enrolled in a course is 1000 days. If you plan on keeping students enrolled longer than that, you'll need to modify Moodle's source code: 1. 2. 3. 4. 50

If you've already installed Moodle, select any value for this field. In the directory /admin, open the file config.htm. Look for the line $options[1000]=get_string("numdays", "", 1000); In both places in that line, replace 1000 with the number of days to keep students enrolled.

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5. Save config.htm. 6. Return to the Variables page by logging into Moodle as the administrator, and selecting Administration | Configuration | Variables. 7. For longtimenosee, select the value you entered into config.htm. You should see it in the pull-down list. 8. Save and exit the Variables page.

deleteunconfirmed Students need an account on your site before they can enroll in a course. If you're using email to authenticate students, this sets the length of time they have to respond to the email. Note that while waiting for a student to respond to the authentication email, the username and email address of that student cannot be used by any other student. So, if a student loses the enrollment email, he or she should either wait until this time has expired or try again with a different username and email address. If a student loses the enrollment email and must use the username and email address in that email, you will need to go into the Moodle database and delete the student's record. Look in the table called mdl_user for the username. You should see that the field confirmed contains a 0 (zero). Delete this record and have the student try enrolling again. You'll need to know how to edit a database to do this.

loglifetime This sets the length of time Moodle keeps log files. Note that it doesn't set a size limit. If you have a very busy site, the log can become large quickly. Unlike most web-based programs that keep logs, Moodle does not keep them in their own files on the server. Instead, Moodle keeps log files in the Moodle database, in the table called mdl_log. This means that your database server must handle both Moodle content and logs. If you have a very active site and a very modest database server, or modest hosting service, this can slow down your site. Consider setting loglifetime to the lowest value that you need to manage your courses. For example, if no course is longer than two weeks, 30 days of logs will usually give you enough time to look back at course activity. You can back up mdl_log to a local disk periodically, so that you can see archived course activity. You'll need to know how to edit a database to do this.

displayloginfailures, notifyloginfailures, and notifyloginthreshold The settings you choose for these fields depend upon how closely you intend to monitor security on your site. There is very little drawback to choosing to display login failures to the administrator and teachers. If you're hosting courses that use an enrollment key, and students have trouble using the key to log in, displayloginfailures can give the administrator and teachers a warning that something is wrong. 51

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For notifyloginfailures to work correctly, the persons being notified must have entered valid email addresses. The setting notifyloginthreshold will cause the system to send an email each time that threshold is reached. If you have this set to 10 failed logins, and your site becomes the target of an automated attack, this could result in a lot of emails clogging your inbox.

sessioncookie If you're running several copies of Moodle from the same site, you can use this to customize the name of the cookie for each copy of Moodle. This prevents each copy of Moodle from using the other's cookie. For example, suppose I had one copy of Moodle running under www.williamrice.com/paid and another running under www.williamrice.com/free. I would not want the cookie set by the copy running under /free to be used by the copy running under /paid. If you're running each copy of Moodle in a different subdomain, you don't need to customize the name of the session cookie. For example, if I was running different copies of Moodle under paid.williamrice.com and free.williarmrice.com, this setting would be unnecessary.

zip and unzip The zip and unzip routines are used to compress entire courses before downloading them, and to uncompress them after uploading them. When you move a course between Moodle sites, or when you want to duplicate an entire course, the usual method is zip-download-upload-unzip. If you think that you will frequently move courses between sites, or duplicate courses, then check with your hosting company to see if they offer this feature. Access to a zip and unzip program might be one of the factors in deciding which hosting service to use. If your hosting service doesn't offer a zip program, then Moodle will use its own, built-in zip program. This uses a lot of memory, so you're always better off using your hosting service's zip program.

slasharguments You need to change this only if you have trouble viewing uploaded graphics. Try running your site before changing this setting.

proxyhost and proxyport Most web servers do not run from behind a firewall, especially paid hosting services. However, if you're hosting Moodle from a personal computer located inside a school or company, there's a good chance you're behind a firewall. For example, if you're hosting Moodle from a computer located at your desk in your school or company, then that host is probably behind the same firewall as every other personal computer in your institution. If this is the case, ask your network administrator for the setting to use in these fields. 52

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If you're hosting Moodle from a personal computer inside your institution, not only might you need to deal with a firewall but also with a changing IP address. The IP address of that computer might change each time your reboot it. This would change the IP address that students use to access your site. If you're running Moodle from a personal computer located inside your institution, ask your network administrator about the proxyhost settings and also if your Moodle server can have a fixed IP address.

framename This feature is useful if you're embedding Moodle inside another site. For example, you may want to embed Moodle into your school's or company's pages, retaining the headers and footers used by your institution. If you embed Moodle like this, consider modifying the content of Moodle's headers and footers so they do not conflict with the information in your institution's headers and footers. You will find the files, header.html and footer.html in the folder /themes/themename, where themename is the name of the theme you chose under Administration | Configuration | Themes.

secureforms Selecting Yes for this setting may cause pages to become unusable for students running firewalls. It gives you a small amount of additional security. If you turn this on, I suggest that you put a notice on your Login Page that the site may not work with a firewall when the firewall strips the IP address, or HTTP_REFERER, from the user's computer.

loginhttps If you select Yes for this setting, but your server doesn't have HTTPS enabled for your site, you will be locked out of your site. Moodle will require you to use HTTPS when you log in, but you won't be able to comply. If that happens to you, then you must go into the Moodle database and change this setting to No. The following screenshot shows an administrator using the web-based product phpMyAdmin to edit this setting in Moodle's database. Notice the setting for logging in via HTTPS is contained in the table mdl_config. The administrator is clicking on the edit icon. If this cell contains a 0, HTTPS login is not required. If it contains a 1, HTTPS login is required. If you're locked out because of HTTPS login, change the contents of this cell to 0.

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allusersaresitestudents The Front Page of your Moodle site can contain the same features as any other course. In fact, the Front Page can act as an introductory course to your site. It can contain forums, resources for students to read, quizzes, and other course material. Building a course on the Front Page of your site can be useful in two ways. First, you can use the Front Page as a sample course for your site. The Front Page course becomes a sales tool. This is a good way to tempt new visitors into joining your site. Alternatively, you can use the Front Page as an introductory course for existing students. This course would teach students how to use your site, how to choose and join courses, your policies and procedures. The Front Page course becomes an orientation. The setting for allusersaresitestudents determines whether everyone who is a student (all registered users) is automatically enrolled in the Front Page course. If you're using the Front Page as a sample or orientation, you probably want this set to Yes.

showsiteparticipantslist This setting determines whether students who are enrolled in the Front Page course (the "site course") are shown on the list of students for that course. Remember that if you set allusersaresitestudents to Yes, then all registered students are in the site course, and on this list. 54

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Setting showsiteparticipantslist to Site teachers means that only teachers who teach the site course can see the list of students. Setting it to Students and teachers means that the students can see each others' name on this list. If all registered students are enrolled in the site course, then they can all see each others' name.

maxbytes There are three settings that limit the size of a file that can be uploaded on your server. The first two are the PHP setting upload_max_filesize and the Apache setting LimitRequestBody. These are set by your hosting service. They are probably greater than the 20 Megabyte maximum that you can set with maxbytes. However, if you set this and then cannot upload files of the size you selected, talk to your system administrator or hosting service provider about their settings for upload_max_filesize and LimitRequestBody.

fullnamedisplay Remember that your students may not want their full names displayed to one another. Consider privacy issues when selecting this setting.

autologinguests When a course is created, the course creator can choose to allow guest access. If this is enabled, when a visitor who is not logged in selects the course, the visitor is taken to Moodle's Login Page. At the Login Page, one of the visitor's options is to Login as a guest. The visitor can then take the course anonymously, using the username guest. If autologinguests is set to Yes, when a visitor who is not logged in chooses a course with guest access enabled, the visitor is taken straight into the course. The Moodle Login Page is bypassed, and the visitor does not need to register or select Login as a guest. This seems very convenient; however, you should consider how this might affect your registered users before enabling it. With autologinguests set to No, when any course is selected, the visitor is taken to the Login Page. If the visitor is a registered student, he or she will login with a username/password. Then that visitor's activity in the guest-enabled course will be logged. However, if autologinguests is set to Yes, when a registered student hits your site and selects a guest-enabled course, the student will bypass the Login Page and be taken straight into the course. This means the student's activity will not be logged. If having a registered student take a course without logging the student's activity is OK, then enable autologinguests. However, if you want to be certain that all of your registered students' activities are logged, then you should disable this feature.

forcelogin As stated in the directions, setting this to Yes causes the Front Page to become hidden until a visitor logs in to Moodle. When visitors first hit your Moodle site, they see the Moodle Login Page. 55

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Setting this to Yes means that you cannot use Moodle's Front Page as an information and sales tool. You can customize the text on the Login Page, but you won't be able to add all the features available to a Moodle course. Setting this to No enables you to use a non-Moodle page as your introduction to the site. If you want your Front Page to be something that cannot be created in Moodle, this is a good option. For example, you might make moodle.williamrice.com/index.htm into a flash presentation about your site. Visitors then click on an Enter link and are taken to the Moodle Login Page at moodle.williamrice.com/moodle/index.php. Notice that Moodle is now in its own subdirectory. If you want a non-Moodle introduction page that leads to a Moodle Login Page, put Moodle into its own subdirectory and not in the same directory as the introduction page. Moodle's Front Page is called index.php, and your introduction page will probably be called index.htm. If they are in the same directory, your server might get confused about which page to serve.

forceloginforprofiles What the directions don't state is that setting this to No enables anonymous visitors to read not only teachers' profiles, but also the profiles of any students enrolled in courses that have guest access. This may be a privacy issue. The effect of enabling forceloginforprofiles is that anonymous visitors cannot read the profiles for the teachers in a course that accepts guest access. They must register as a student before being able to read student and user profiles. This may be a drawback if your teachers' profiles are a selling point for the course. Consider enabling forceloginforprofiles to force people to register before reading student or teacher profiles. Then, if your teachers' profiles are a selling point, you can add a section to the Front Page for "About Our Teachers".

opentogoogle This setting lets the Google indexing robot into a course that allows guest access. If you want to know more about the Googlebot, see http://www.google.com/bot.html. It seems that everyone with a website wants their site to be ranked high in Google's search results. However, you should consider whether you really want Google to add each of your guest-enabled courses to its search engine. There are several disadvantages: • •

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If your course content changes frequently, Google might index out-of-date information for your courses. Your students and teachers might not want their names and materials indexed and available to the public.

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•

If Google indexes all of your guest-enabled courses, you have less control over what information about your site appears in Google. Everything on the pages that the Googlebot searches is used in indexing your site. There might be items on those pages that don't accurately represent your site. For example, a negative forum posting or an off-topic discussion could become associated with your site. Also, if the focus or structure of your Moodle site changes, it may take awhile before all the Google references to all those pages are corrected.

If you want strict control over what information appears in Google about your site, then set opentogoogle to No. Put only the information that you want to appear in Google on the Front Page of your site, and do not allow teachers or students to modify anything on the Front Page. This way, Google will index only your Front Page. You should also request anyone who links to your site to link only to the Front Page (for example, "Please link only to http//www.moodle.williamrice.com, not directly to a course page.") Google and other search engines use links to your site to calculate your ranking. If all those links point to the same page, you can better control your site's public image. By setting opentogoogle to No, and requesting that people link only to the Front Page, you are trading away some of your search engine presence in exchange for greater control of your site's public image. For the ultimate in control of what information about your site is indexed, consider this plan: set forcelogin to Yes to keep search engine robots out of Moodle completely. Set opentogoogle to No to prevent Google from crawling your guest courses. Set autologinguests to No to eliminate the possibility that any other search engine's robots crawl your guest courses. Now you've locked out all but registered users. Put Moodle into a subdirectory of your site. Link to Moodle from the index page at the root of your site. In my case, I would put Moodle into moodle.williamrice.com/ moodle/ and link to it from moodle.williamrice.com/index.htm. Then, use index.htm as an introduction to your site. Ensure that index.htm contains exactly the kind of information you want the public to know about your site, and optimize it for the best search engine placement.

enablerssfeeds An RSS feed is when a website supplies selected content to the rest of the world. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. You may have seen web pages that have a section where news from a major news source appears. For example, my personal site has RSS feeds from Web Developer News and BBC: Technology in the left column:

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Those RSS feeds are updated periodically. You can also enable RSS feeds for your Moodle site. This variable enables and disables the feeds site-wide. Then, for each module you enable RSS feeds individually. For example, your Moodle site can feed, or syndicate, the latest forum entries by enabling RSS feeds here and in the Forums module (under Administration | Configuration | Modules | Forum Settings). Remember that you're not using RSS to announce the latest content changes inside your Moodle site. You're using it to announce those changes to the rest of the world. RSS feeds can be read by most popular email clients, such as Outlook, Thunderbird, and Netscape Mail. This is probably how your students will receive the RSS feeds from your learning site. In the following example, I've subscribed to http://www.moodle.org's RSS feed. Notice how each individual feed shows up as an email.

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The site administrator must use this setting to enable RSS feeds. The administrator can choose to allow only the administrator to create RSS feeds, or to allow teachers to create RSS feeds. Allowing teachers to create RSS feeds enables them to add RSS to the courses they teach. For example, a teacher could add RSS to a course forum. Assuming the students use their email program to get RSS feeds, the students would then see a new feed item when the forum is updated. This is a good way for the teacher to stay in touch with the students.

digestmailtime This is the time that email digests get sent to users who have subscribed to digests. It is the time on the server, so if your server is located in a different time zone than you or your students, consider the time difference when setting this.

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Installation Step 8: Upgrading the Database and Setting Up Tables After stepping through a few more screens, install.php upgrades the Moodle database and creates more tables. You don't need to do anything during this part of the installation except click to see the next screen. The installation script tells you when this is complete.

Installation Step 9: Site Settings After creating the database tables, the installation script displays the Site settings page. The values you enter on this page affect Moodle's Front Page. Of course, you want to enter them correctly the first time. However, after Moodle is installed, you can return to this page at any time to change these variables. The screenshot below shows the top of the Site settings page for my demonstration site. Notice the breadcrumbs line at the top shows that I'm on the site whose short name is wildskills, and that to get to this page I've selected Administration, then Configuration, and then Site settings:

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Let's examine how each of the Site settings influences the Front Page and the user experience.

Full Site Name The full site name appears at the top of the Front Page, in the browser's title bar, and also on the page tab in Netscape or Firefox:

The full site name also appears in the metadata for the Front Page. Here are the first few lines of HTML code from my Front Page. The line containing the full site name is in bold:

Short Name for Site Once a user enters your Moodle site, a navigation line is displayed at the top of each page. This shows the user where he or she is in the site. The first item in this navigation line, or breadcrumb trail, is the short site name:

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Front Page Description This description appears in the left or right column of your site's Front Page. If you require visitors to register and log in before seeing the Front Page (see forcelogin under Installation Step 7d: Specify Site Variables), remember that visitors will see this information after they have logged in. In that case, the Front Page description can't be used to sell your site. Instead, it can instruct students on how to get started with your site. For example, "Take the Introduction course to learn how to use this site…" If your Front Page is visible to all visitors, then you can use this description to sell your site, tempt visitors to take a sample course, tell them what's inside, etc. Remember that the Front Page description always appears in the left or right column of the Front Page. It does not appear in the center column. If you want your site description (e.g. Welcome to the....) top and center, you'll need to include a topic section (covered next), which always appears in the center of your Front Page. You would make your site description the first topic. In this case, you turn the Front Page Description off. Also, this description appears in the metadata of the first page:

The implication here is that even if you plan to use a Topic section to put your site description top and center, instead of using the Front Page Description in a column on the left or right side, you should type your site description into this field. Even though you've turned off the Front Page Description, it will still show up in the metadata, which can be helpful for optimizing search engine results.

Front Page Format This setting determines whether the center column of the Front Page shows news items, a list of courses, or a list of course categories. Each setting has its unique advantages. 62

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Show News items This setting is useful if the content of your site changes frequently, and you want to keep visitors informed. If one of the primary purposes of your Front Page is serving repeat customers, showing news items on the Front Page is a good idea.

The downside is that the list of course categories is now relegated to a side column. If you want the course categories, or courses themselves, to be displayed more prominently, you'll need to use Show a list of categories or Show a list of courses.

Show a List of Categories This setting is useful if you want to make it easy for your students to find and select a course. It puts the course categories in the center of the Front Page. The drawback is that you no longer have a news section at the center and top for your repeat visitors.

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I've added a topic section to the Front Page (this is covered next). The topic section gave me an area where I can add course resources. To this topic section, I added a label. The label consists of the Desert Plants Course Added notice that you see in the screenshot. The label is not as convenient to manage as a news area. However, this method does enable me to get the course categories on the Front Page, while still posting an announcement center top. Notice that in the previous screenshot, for Show news items, I chose to keep the course category listing in the left column. Now that I'm showing course categories in the center, the list of categories in the left-hand block became superfluous. Later, we'll cover how to turn blocks off and on for the Front Page.

Show a List of Courses Notice also that I've added a Main menu in the left column, with links to detailed information about the site, how to use it, and the enrollment/payment page. The welcome message in the right column and the links to detailed information about the site in the left column serves my new visitors. The label (announcement), Desert Plants Course Added and course options Available Courses in the center serve my existing customers.

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This setting makes it as easy as possible for students to find the course they're looking for. It can also be a powerful marketing tool. Notice the icon next to each course. Clicking this gives the visitor a description of the course (later in the section on creating courses, you'll see how to enter a course description). If you want to encourage visitors to do this, you could insert another label between the announcement Desert Plants Course Added and the Available Courses section, saying something like, "For a short description of each course, click on the next to it." The drawback to using Show a list of courses is that the course list can get very long. You must decide how much tolerance your visitors are likely to have for scrolling and browsing through a long list of courses.

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Configuration Choices after Installation You won't be prompted for these configuration choices, but after installation you should look at these settings. You may want to make some choices immediately after installation, and others you may want to delay. All of these settings can be changed later.

Filters You'll find the Filters settings under Administration | Configuration | Filters. Filters go through all the text that you enter in your courses, and process this text. For the most part, Filters create an automatic link whenever a glossary term or learning resource is mentioned on your site. They also handle special mathematical notation. Read the descriptions below for detailed information about what filters can do for your site.

Auto-Linking Filters The Auto-linking filters search the text on your site, and automatically link to items when they find an item mentioned in the text. For example, Glossary Auto-linking looks for terms that are in any glossary, and when it finds them links the term to the glossary entry. The term is highlighted, and when a user clicks it, the user is taken to the glossary. Resource Names Auto-linking searches course text for the names of course resources.

When it finds the name of a resource, it links the name to the resource. This means whenever a student sees the name of a document, web page, or other course resource, the student can just click on the name and be taken to the resource. Activity Names Auto-linking works the same way for course activities. Wiki Page Auto-linking creates a link to a Wiki page whenever the page is mentioned on the site. 66

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Math Filters Algebra Notation and TeX Notation search the text for special characters used to describe mathematical formulas. For example, if you enter @@cosh(x,2)@@ the Algebra Notation

filter will display it as:

cosh 2 ( x ) If you enter $$ \Bigsum_{i=\1}^{n-\1}$$, the TeX Notation filter will display it as: n −1

∑ i =1

Algebra Notation and TeX Notation are standard markup languages. The http://www.moodle.org site contains more information about Algebra Notation. For more information about TeX, see the TeX Users Group at tug.org. TeX is more mature and complete than Algebra Notation. If you plan on writing more complex equations, I suggest making the TeX Notation filter active and leaving the Algebra Notation filter inactive.

Email Protection Filter Activating this filter makes email addresses on the site unreadable to search engines, while keeping them 'human-readable'. If you set opentogoogle to No, or require users to log in, then you probably don't need to worry about search engines automatically picking up your students' email addresses. If your site is open to search engines and anonymous users, then you might want to use this filter to protect the users' email addresses.

Multimedia Plugins If you leave this filter inactive, then multimedia content will usually play in a separate window. For example, without this filter, when a user clicks on a video, that video might open and play in a separate Windows Media Player or RealPlayer window. By activating this filter, you embed multimedia so that it plays on the page in which it was linked.

Multi-Language Content In the Variables screen, you used the variable langlist to determine which languages, if any, users can select. When a user selects one of these languages, only the Moodle interface is translated. The course content remains in whatever language you created it. If you want your site to be truly multi-lingual, you can also create course content in several languages. Activating the Multi-Language Content filter will then cause the course material to be displayed in the selected language. 67

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To create course content in multiple languages, you must enclose text written in each language in a tag, like this: Basic Botany Botánica Básica

This requires that you write course material in HTML. This can be done for headings, course descriptions, course material, and any other HTML document that Moodle displays.

Filter Uploaded files Setting this to Yes applies the activated filters to files that teachers and students upload to Moodle. When set to No, Moodle's filters apply only to content created in Moodle.

Backup You'll find the backup settings under Administration | Configuration | Backup. Most of these settings enable you to choose the type of data that gets backed up. You also choose on which days of the week the backup will automatically run. The backup is activated by the cron job routine (see Installation Step 6: Setting up the Cron Job). The backups are stored in compressed, or ZIP format. In the Variables page, you indicated if your hosting service has a zip program or if Moodle should use its own, built-in zip program (see zip and unzip under Installation Step 7d: Specify Site Variables). If you activate automatic backups, and Moodle must use its built-in zip program during the backups, you might see backup failures caused by lack of memory. If you plan on using the backup feature for more than a handful of courses, ensure that your hosting service offers a zip program on its servers.

Authentication Authentication and login are different. Authentication is what happens when a new user signs up for your site, and creates a new Moodle account. Login is when an authenticated user logs into Moodle. Moodle offers a variety of ways to authenticate users. You'll find them under Administration | Users | Authentication options. Each of the options is explained on that page. This subsection will fill in a few key blanks left by Moodle's explanations. When you authenticate users with an external database (MySQL, Oracle, etc.), Moodle copies over the username and password from the external database into Moodle's internal database. From then on, when the user logs into Moodle, it uses Moodle's internal database to check the username and password. There is no live link between the external database and Moodle's user database. This means that if the user changes his or her username and password in the external database, the username and password in Moodle is not changed. 68

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When you authenticate users with a server (LDAP, IMAP, etc.), Moodle checks the username and password against that server every time the user logs in. If the user changes his or her password on the server, the user will have that new password in Moodle. If you authenticate against an external database or an LDAP server, you can have Moodle bring over user information from the database or server. This user information is copied into Moodle at the time of authentication. For example, Moodle can copy over the user's first name, last name, and email address. Once it's copied into Moodle, it is no longer synchronized with the external database.

Enrolment Choices Enrolment is different from authentication. In authentication, you confirm a user's membership to your site. In enrolment, you grant or confirm a user's access to a course. You have several options for managing student enrolment. They are found under Administration | Users | Enrolments.

External Database You can use an external database to control student enrolment. In this case, Moodle looks in the designated database and determines if the student is enrolled. As of version 1.4, Moodle will not write back to the external database. All changes in the external database are made by another program. In addition to using the external database, you can also allow Moodle's normal enrolment routine. Checking enrol_allowinternal enables this feature. If you enable internal enrolment in addition the external database, Moodle checks two databases when a student tries to enter a course: the external one, and its internal one. In the External Database screen, you designate which field in Moodle corresponds to the course name field in the external database. In the example overleaf, you can see the Edit course settings for the Basic Botany course. I've given this course an ID number of 0001. This course ID number will correspond to the same ID number in the external database. To match the field ID number from course settings against the external database, I need to enter the field name for ID number in enrol_localcoursefield.

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The temptation is to type ID number into enrol_localcoursefield, since ID number is what you see in the Edit Course Settings screen. Surely that is the field name, right? Well, no. Take look at the Moodle database, in the mdl_course table, and you'll see the real name of this field is idnumber:

Similarly, we would look up the field name for the student's ID number, and enter that into enrol_localuserfield.

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Flat File The flat file method of student enrolment causes Moodle to read in a text file, or "flat file," and use that as the source for enrolment information. The flat file has this format: operation, role, ID number of user, ID number of course

where: • operation is add or del. • role is student, teacher, or teacheredit. • ID number of user is the field idnumber from the database table mdl_user. ID number of course is the field idnumber from the database table mdl_course. Moodle periodically reads in this file, and modifies its enrolment data according to what the file says. For example, the line add, student, 0005, WP102

will add the student with the ID number of 0005 to the course with the ID number of WP102. Place this file in a directory that is accessible to your web server. For example, you can put it inside the data directory.

Internal Enrolment This is the default form of enrolment. When this is selected, there are two ways to enroll a student in a course: • •

A teacher or administrator can enroll the student. From within the course, the teacher selects Students and is taken to the Enroll students screen. The prospective student is supplied with an enrolment key. Using this key, the student can enroll in the course.

Paypal The Paypal option enables you to set up paid access to the site, or to individual courses. When you select this option, if you enter a value of zero into enrol_cost, students can access the site for free. If you enter a non-zero amount, students must pay to access the site. Selecting this option puts an enrol_cost field into the Edit Course Settings screen Wildskills | Administration | Users | Enrolments of every course. Again, entering a non-zero amount into this field requires students to pay to access the course. The Paypal payment screen displays a notice that this course requires a payment for entry. It also contains a button labeled Send payment via Paypal. You can modify this screen by modifying the source file at enrol/paypal/enrol.php.

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Summary This chapter tells you how to make changes to the Variables page. The values you enter on this page affect the behavior of the entire site. The values you enter on the Site settings page affect Moodle's Front Page. It covers the creation of the database, which is also very important. You need to know the correct amount of disk space and the bandwidth required for the software. It also covers the ways of authenticating Moodle users and how your choice affects the operation of your site. It also helps you to make the right configuration choices during and after the installation process. You can edit the choices, if you have already made any. The configuration choices that are made during the installation process affect the student and teacher experience in Moodle. Once you have completed the installation of Moodle, you can continue with the next chapter, Creating Categories and Courses. It will help you understand how to create course structures and settings and change them as needed.

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3 Creating Categories and Courses This chapter's focus is on helping you create different categories and courses. While someone else may have installed Moodle and made these choices for you, you can always go back and change them. The following sections will help you to create and organize course categories. It will also tell you how to put a course into several categories.

Using Course Categories and the User Experience Every Moodle course belongs to one course category. When a student selects a course, the student must first select a category. In the next example, the student selected the Tracking and Animal Observation category from the Front Page, and is selecting a course from that category:

Creating Categories and Courses

Notice that even though the student is looking at the Tracking and Animal Observation category, a drop-down list of Course categories enables the student to see the other categories. Typical of Moodle, this enables the student to jump to another part of the site without having to return to the Front Page. Categories are a site-wide way to organize your courses. You can also create subcategories. The categories or subcategories become an online course catalog. Organize them in the same intuitive way as you would a printed course catalog.

Creating Course Categories You create course categories in the Administration | Course categories screen. After logging in as an administrator, the fastest way to reach this screen is selecting Courses from the Administration block.

In the resulting screen, you create new categories and courses. You also arrange the order in which the categories are displayed:

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Organizing Course Categories To move a course category up or down in the list, click the or in the Edit column. To hide a course category while you're working on it, click . The eye will then close, indicating the category is hidden from users. To delete a category, select . You can use subcategories in Moodle. For example, suppose I want to categorize the Wild Plants courses by habitat. In the following page, you can see that I've added two new categories, Woodlands and Jungle. I've hidden these categories because I'm still working on them. I moved Woodlands to the Wild Plants category, making Woodlands a subcategory. I am in the process of making Jungle a subcategory of Wild Plants:

Putting a Course into Several Categories One of Moodle's limitations is that you can put a course into only one category. In some situations, you might want to put the same course into several categories. You have several options: •

•

You can forego the use of categories, and use direct links to the courses. In Chapter 4, you'll see how to add labels and links to the Front Page. You can use labels as your category names, and put the links below the labels. You can create the course in one category, duplicate it, and upload the copy into another category. This has the disadvantage of requiring you to manage two separate courses. Students might also become confused about which iteration of the course they enrolled in.

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•

You can create the course in one category, and then create an identically named course in the second category. However, you will put only one thing into the second course: a JavaScript that automatically forwards the user to the real course.

You can search the Web for a free JavaScript to use, or here is one from http://javascriptkit.com/ that you can add to the course as a label: You will be redirected to the script in

seconds

Creating Courses Don't worry if you mistakenly put a course into the wrong category. In the next section, The Course Settings Page, you can change the category. You can also do this from the administration screen: 76

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1. 2. 3. 4.

Select Administration | Course categories. Select the category that currently holds the course. Click the checkbox next to the course whose category you want to change. From the drop-down list, select the new category for the course.

The Course Settings Page When you create a course, you must fill out fields on the Course Settings page. Many of these fields are self-explanatory. Some of them, especially Format and Group mode, have a profound effect on the user experience. You can always return to this page and change the course settings. The course, and its structure, will be updated with the new settings as soon as you save them. The page itself does a good job of explaining the purpose of each setting. However, the directions do not tell you the implications of the choices you make on this page. In the following, I've added some commentary to help you determine how your choices will affect the operation of your site, and information to help you decide upon the right choices for your needs.

Category If you selected a course category and then created the course, you'll see the category displayed in this field. You can use the drop-down list to change the category at any time. The list shows both visible and hidden categories. As your site grows and you add categories, you may want to reorganize your site. However, if a student logs in while you are in the middle of creating categories and moving courses, he or she might be confused. It would be best if you can make the reorganization as quickly as possible—ideally, instantaneously. You can speed the reorganization time by hiding your categories as you create them. This lets you take your time while thinking about what categories to use. Then, move the courses into the categories. Each course will disappear until you finally reveal the new categories.

Full Name and Short Name The full name of the course appears at the top of the page when viewing the course, and also in course listings. The short name appears in the breadcrumb trail, at the top of the page. In this example, the full name is Basic Botany for Foragers and the short name is Wild Plants 1:

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The full name also appears in the page's title and metadata, which influences its search engine rankings. Here's the HTML code from the example above:

Notice the full course name in the